This is an excerpt from Sensational Victoriathat includes a map of James Bay, then and now photos, and a walking tour of Emily Carr’s neighbourhood in 1913.
More than 12,000 people visit Emily Carr House every year. Eve Lazarus photo, 2011
Her name adorns a university, a school, a bridge, and a library. She is the subject of several documentaries, museum exhibits, books and plays. In 2009, her painting Wind in the Tree Tops sold for more than $2.1 million, one of the highest-priced Canadian paintings ever sold at auction. Tourists visit her family home, seek out her sketching places along Dallas Road and Beacon Hill Park and walk over the memorial bridge paid for by her sister Alice. Her grave is the most sought-after in the Ross Bay Cemetery.
Emily Carr’s presence in Victoria is pervasive. Yet for most of her life, she was shunned by the Victoria of her day, and for all of her fame, locals still seem a bit stunned by the attention. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010—65 years after her death—that Victoria honoured the artist with a $400,000 statue on the lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel.
Emily was born at Carr House in 1871, and died a few blocks away at the James Bay Inn, 74 years later. For most of her life, she lived in James Bay and wrote extensively about the area and her family’s homes.
James Bay is the oldest residential area of Victoria and takes its name from Governor James Douglas. Douglas built his house in the 1850s on the current site of the Royal BC Museum. Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken married Douglas’s daughter and built his house next door. His house is still there and is now a provincial museum.
Map of James Bay walking tour created for Sensational Victoria by Ross Nelson, 2012
Until a causeway was completed in the early 1900s, Government Street was made up of Carr Street (named after Emily’s father Richard), Birdcage Walk, and the James Bay Bridge—a wooden bridge that crossed the mud flats and continued downtown.
In 1908, the James Bay mud flats were hidden underneath the spanking new $13-million Empress Hotel. By the 1940s, houses had taken over all the land. Postwar development hit in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s and ‘70s—as in Vancouver’s West End—many of Victoria’s superb heritage houses were bulldozed to make room for apartment buildings.
Emily with her animals in 1918. Courtesy Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
Yet with all these changes, the Victoria Heritage Foundation still lists over 150 buildings on its heritage inventory, some like Helmcken’s, that date back to the 1850s.
Emily started writing in the late 1920s and had seven books published during her lifetime and after her death. She wrote extensively about James Bay and her family house in The Book of Small, and about how much she hated being a landlady in The house of All Sorts.
Mother Cecilia bought the hotel in 1942 and ran it as St. Mary’s Priory. Emily died here in 1945. Eve Lazarus photo, 2011
What was great, at least in 2012 when I was putting this tour together, was that most of the houses that involve Emily—including the home where she was born on Government Street, the “House of All Sorts,” known for all the different people who boarded there, two of her sister’s houses, and James Bay Hotel (Inn) built in 1911, are all still there.
This is an occasional series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down.
603 Manchester Road in Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood
Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the BC Archives.
Favourite Building:
One of my favourite houses is an unprepossessing, colonial-style bungalow on Manchester Road. The house was built in 1908 by Charles Deacon, who had emigrated from England with his family six years earlier, and became the foreman of a Rock Bay sawmill. I like the design and proportions of the house; and I applaud the current owners for painting the exterior a warm yellow, a colour that was popular when the house was built. This is an unfashionable part of Victoria and old houses like this are at risk. Kudos to City of Victoria Heritage Planners, who have recommended that the 600 block of Manchester and adjacent Dunedin Street, be designated as a Heritage Conservation Area. The proposal still needs to be approved by homeowners. Fingers crossed.
The Coburn family home at 2640 Blanshard, an Italianate-style house built in 1898.
The one that got away:
In the 1960s when “urban renewal” was popular and local authorities were eradicating “blighted areas,” Victoria City council used the program to demolish nearly 160 houses in its Rose-Blanshard Renewal Scheme. This “blighted” area consisted of houses built in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rose Street was its centre and North Ward School (1894), a four-storey brick structure, was a landmark. The school and neighbouring residences were demolished so that Blanshard Street could be widened to benefit motorists travelling from the new BC ferry terminal. Properties were expropriated, and occupants who refused to leave their homes were forcibly evicted. The Coburn family home was the last house standing when it was bulldozed in March 1969. It was replaced with Blanshard Court, a “low income housing estate,” now called Evergreen Terrace.
The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro’s Books of Victoria.
My daily workplace is a magnificent former bank building. The Edwardian-era former Royal Bank of Canada at 1108 Government St. was in terrible disrepair when purchased (against his banker’s advice) by Jim Munro in 1984. He returned the structure to its former glory, notably removing a suspended ceiling added as part of a modernizing renovation in the 1950s. Today, tapered pilasters and a cast-plaster coffer ceiling attract tourists from around the globe eager to visit a bookstore co-founded in 1963 by future Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Designed in 1909 by local architect Thomas Hooper as a Temple Bank in the Classical Revival style, with an all-granite facade including two impressive Doric columns, Munro’s Books remains a temple to a commerce less pecuniary than literary.
Exhibition Building, Willows Fairgrounds, Oak Bay (Victoria) (BCArchives H-02390)
The one that got away:
In 1899, a grand exhibition hall with an adjacent horse racing track was built on farmland in Oak Bay. The roof stood 56 feet above the ground with central octagonal towers reaching to a height of 100 feet. An open cupola topped the impressive building, which dominated the Willows Fairgrounds like a manor house amid verdant lawns.
Among the visitors to the exhibition hall, which boasted 20,000 square feet of floor space surrounded by galleries, was the future King George V.
The building and the streetcar connection, that now extended from Royal Jubilee Hospital to the fairgrounds, spurred the growth of Oak Bay, which incorporated as a municipality in 1906. Alas, the building was destroyed by fire in 1907, to be replaced by a warehouse structure of little merit. The site of the fairgrounds was subdivided into housing after the Second World War with 10 acres reserved for Carnarvon Park.
Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Eve Lazarus is a journalist, author and blogger who has a passion for unconventional history and a fascination with murder. She is the author of Cold Case Vancouver.
Favourite Building:
Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in 1913, and according to a story built the cottage “nail by nail” with the help of “one old carpenter.” After a bit of digging it turns out the carpenter was Thomas Cattarall, who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and worked on Hatley Castle. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the little cottage. Terry Tallentire stepped in, paid the city $1.00, spent another $4,000 to move it to her house, and it now lives behind a Samuel Maclure designed house on Foul Bay Road. (The full story is in Sensational Victoria).
The Wilson mansion at 730 Burdett Avenue, Victoria
The one that got away:
There are many reasons why Victoria should have saved the Wilson Mansion, but perhaps the best one is because its social history is just so eccentric. There’s the overprotective father who surrounded it with high walls, Jane, the daughter who kept exotic birds in the attic and owned a 100 pairs of white gloves. And there’s the beneficiary of her will in 1949—Louis, a macaw parrot from South America, who was then in his eighties. Jane named Wah Wong, the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper, and the terms of the will stated that the property could not be sold while the birds were still alive. The feathered tenants managed to stave off developers until 1966, when it was bulldozed to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel.
I was so sad to hear of Jim Munro’s death last Monday. Jim was a huge promoter and lover of books, heritage buildings, art and authors, including of course, his first wife the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro.
He was also a lovely man. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim a few years back when I was researching Sensational Victoria. Because my book was about the stories of people filtered through the houses where they lived and the heritage buildings where they worked, I was fascinated by both Jim Munro’s home and Munro’s Books, the building that he turned into a destination.
Jim told me that in 1966 he fell in love with a house in Rockland that was asking $33,000, and likely designed by the infamous Francis Rattenbury. The house had been turned into a duplex and was in rough shape, but Jim could see the potential, and managed to get the owners down to $20,000. Alice wrote Dance of the Happy Shades, a 1968 Governor General award winner in an upstairs room, and followed that with her bestselling Lives of Girls and Women. The Munro’s divorced in 1972 and Alice moved back to Ontario.
Rockland Avenue house
In 1977, Jim married textile artist Carole Sabiston in what the family called the “chapel” because of the stained-glass effect Jim had painted around the windows and for his old pump organ that still sits under the staircase. Jim played Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary on the organ before the wedding.
“I marry artists,” Jim told me “and I love heritage buildings.”
Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan, Vikram Seth, Jane Urquhart, Carol Shields and Simon Winchester, were just a few of the literary greats that have visited the house.
Carole kindly showed me through the house and garden. Both are beautiful and quirky. There is a wall of wearable art—everything from straw hats to top hats. One corner of a room has a key collection—big iron keys to tiny clock keys collected from flea markets around the world. Another corner has a collection of carpet beaters. Out in the garden, Carole created the Philosopher’s Walk for Jim with a bust of Voltaire.
Carole added a studio that’s connected to the house by a glazed passage. It was here that she created the dramatic five-panel work of mountains and ocean that hangs in Government House, as well as perhaps her most publicly accessible work: eight large banners depicting the seasons that hang in Munro’s Books on Government Street.
In 1984, Jim bought the Royal Bank building, designed by Thomas Hooper, the same architect who designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, the Victoria Public Library, Roger’s Chocolate building and Christina Haas’s Cook Street Brothel.
“No one wanted a used bank building except me,” he said. “People thought I was insane because in those days there weren’t huge bookstores like there are now, but people who buy books also appreciate art and beautiful buildings.”
In December 2012 Jim invited me to have a Victoria launch at Munro’s and hang out with a bunch of local authors that included Kit Pearson, Sheryl McFarlane and Bill Gaston. Two years later he retired and handed over the keys and inventory to four long-time staffers. That same year he received the Order of Canada.
In 1912, when it was tough for a woman to make a decent living, Christina Haas arrived in Victoria and bought herself a brothel.
Christina Haas commissioned Thomas Hooper to design her Cook Street brothel in 1913. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Thomas Hooper once had the largest architectural practice in Western Canada. He designed hundreds of buildings including the Victoria Public Library, the Rogers Chocolates and the Munro’s Books Building in Victoria. And in 1912, the same year he designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s Winch Building and submitted plans for UBC, he designed Christina Haas’s, Cook Street brothel.
This is an excerpt from my chapter on the Red Light District in Sensational Victoria.
Cook Street Brothel:
It’s a gorgeous four-square house built in the Classic Revival style. According to the real estate blurb it was remodeled into a five-suite apartment complex in 1945 and it’s the first time the house has been on the market in 55 years. The going price is just under $2 million.
Christina is a shadowy figure. She arrived from California in 1912 at the age of 50 and took over an established brothel on Broughton Street with a steady clientele from the Union Club and Driard Hotel. Business was booming and she decided to move into a more upscale facility in Fairfield. She paid cash for the two lots and took out a building permit in her name and commissioned Hooper to design her brothel.
Thomas Hooper:
Although there is no mention of the Cook Street house in his portfolio, the blueprints are signed by the architect and bear his address. They show a house with three bedrooms, each with a separate entrance and its own bathroom. There are rumours that a secret door once led to a concealed wine cellar.
Neighbours tell stories passed down over the years. The women who worked at the Cook Street brothel wore business attire, and several married, raised families, and went about the rest of their respectable lives ignoring the occasional raised eyebrow and whisper.
Brothel changes hands:
Christina is listed as the owner of the property in the city directories until 1920. The brothel then sold to John Day, a wealthy businessman, and his wife, Eliza Amelia. Day owned the Esquimalt Hotel until it burned down in 1914. He also managed the Silver Springs Brewery and later the Phoenix Brewery. Eliza sold the house after his death in 1944.
Even after Day bought the Cook Street house, his tax notices were sent to Christina’s other brothel on Broughton Street, suggesting that he may have had an ownership stake in both.
Christina’s nephew Earl tells me his aunt sold all her brothel holdings in Victoria in 1919 and moved to Mendocino County to be near her brother John Henry and his wife Eva in Westport. She died in 1938 at the age of 76, and is buried in the Fort Bragg Rose Memorial Cemetery.
Emily Carr’s presence in Victoria is pervasive. Yet for most of her life, she was shunned by the Victoria of her day, and for all of her fame, locals still seem a bit stunned by the attention. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010—65 years after her death—that Victoria honoured the artist with a $400,000 statue on the lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel.
